The first time it happens, you’re surprised. One day, your friend with the roommates and the wobbly employment and the busted phone — they buy an apartment. They tell you they’re moving, then they admit they’re buying, and suddenly you’re standing in the living room they own. It’s not that you’d never talked about money, if you count the years spent passing $17 back and forth on Venmo; it’s just that you thought you were on the same track. That when you said “broke,” you understood it to mean the same thing. It’s as if you were both paddling aimlessly in New York’s sea of downward mobility when your friend burst out of the water and stumbled onto the beach. The source of the apartment is not a mystery. It’s parent money. When the job is nonprofit and the trips are European, when the work is too freelance and their kids’ school too private, when they close on a co-op before they finish their dissertation, sure, it could be crypto. It could be sex work. But if you know someone under 50 who owns their apartment, who’s out every night, or who sends their kid to private nursery school and still has money left for vacation, it’s safe to assume there’s a baby-boomer behind them. “New York has always been stuffed with rich kids chasing the dream on Daddy’s dime,” writes Madeline Leung Coleman. “However, it didn’t always feel as if those were the only people who could live here — as if the whole city bent to the budgets of the secretly funded. It does feel that way now.” Revisit Coleman’s 2025 piece on the parents slowly transferring trillions of dollars to their New York City children one down payment and Via Carota tab at a time: nymag.visitlink.me/yUdlwf